Traditional phone systems, including mobile and landline systems, have been limited with respect to options available to users, especially with respect to answering phone calls. Specifically, such traditional phone systems generally only provide limited alternatives to a user when receiving a phone call. These alternatives are typically restricted to answering the incoming phone call, terminating the incoming phone call, and/or ignoring the incoming phone call which customarily allows the phone call to be forwarded to an answering machine or voicemail.
In addition, automated phone answering systems have been created for allowing large businesses to deal with a large number of incoming phone calls. For example, automated logic has generally allowed all callers to be automatically put on hold without any manual input until an available representative on a receiving end of the phone call can answer the call. However, despite the advantages of this type of automated logic, such as conveniently dealing with large numbers of simultaneous phone calls, conventional automated phone answering systems are still quite limited and are simply not equipped for personal phone use.
Just by way of example, a phone user may desire to answer a phone call such that the phone call does not get automatically transferred to voicemail, but may be unable to do so due to being temporarily unavailable. For instance, the phone user may be attending a final portion of a meeting, driving in a vehicle, etc. With respect to these and/or other related situations, greater functionality for handling incoming phone calls is needed to conveniently provide alternatives to simply answering and/or ignoring incoming phone calls.
There is thus a need for overcoming these and/or other problems associated with the prior art.